A Victim of the Aurora

by Thomas Keneally

  Paul said nothing in reply to this. Alec possessed some ultimate authority – he had been to Cape Crozier one spring during Stewart’s first expedition. He had seen the chicks perhaps six weeks after they ceased being embryos and cracked their way out of their eggs.

  ‘Yet when you consider,’ he continued, ‘the price at which this is done.’ He coughed. ‘There are probably six thousand adults in the Cape Crozier rookery. Six thousand males astride their eggs. They’ll have been starving six weeks when we arrive. And even with their blubber for insulation they pay a savage price in terms of cold for the biological privilege of breeding. Consider what they might do if they all turned on us in rage.’

  ‘So,’ said Paul, ‘they await their first clan chieftain, eh? Their first organizing King? That’s poetry, Alec, but scarcely zoology.’

  We stopped far out in the sound. The silence was that kind of Antarctic silence in which you can hear a dog bark eight miles away.

  ‘Shall we jog back?’ Alec suggested.

  I excused myself quickly. ‘I have some residual soreness.’

  Alec cantered away and Paul was tensed to follow. I restrained him with a hand. He looked at me, half-smiling.

  When Alec was more than a hundred yards ahead, I said, ‘Paul. I think you must have killed Victor.’

  He looked straight at me, biting his bottom lip. Then he turned his eyes, the frosty lenses of his spectacles, to the ice-surface and began to nudge it with the blunt toe of his finnesköe.

  ‘That’s right, Tony. As Hamlet must have killed Claudius, I suppose.’

  I watched Alec diminishing in size ahead of us. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Hamlet? Claudius?’

  ‘I hope,’ said Paul, ‘it won’t interfere with the Cape Crozier journey. That means so much to me.’

  I put a hand on his shoulder, just to support myself. I started weeping in front of him. ‘Oh Paul,’ I said.

  ‘I had more sanction than Hamlet. I had better authority than a ghost. That man …’ He began to lose control of his lips. ‘… that man told me himself. He had … he had an actual letter from her.’

  There was only one her in Paul’s canon. ‘Your mother? A letter from your mother, Paul?’

  ‘I don’t blame him for coming, I suppose he’d already made his arrangements and he couldn’t change them just because I was chosen. Just because my eyesight made me a late selection.’

  He looked at me but I could not see the eyes for the rime on the lenses. ‘But I blame him for bringing the letter from her. He had something in his baggage to maim everyone with. And for me he had a letter that said, Dearest Victor, Our son … our son … is well and sucks from his mother and will never be importunate with his father.’

  The whole great crime lay before me on McMurdo ice. It was all tentacles. It was more livid and purple, more glutinously, more heinously limbed than anything Hoosick and Quincy would ever bring up from beneath the ice. It was the grandest and worst cancer and might yet devour our crude society and stain the primal landscape.

  ‘It isn’t her fault,’ Paul assured me. ‘She thought I was a child of love. She told me whenever I asked. She would say, I can’t tell you who he is, because you might visit him and see he’s not interested. But I tell you this, you’re a child of love. Love, she said, love is the only legitimacy.’

  He shook his head at the memory, like a good son remembering little domestic eccentricities.

  ‘You know Mother,’ he continued indulgently, ‘her opinions of marriage! Of family life …!’

  At last I could speak. ‘The rumour always was … that you were the son of that confectioner. Who was he? Howard … Howard Middleton.’

  ‘Mother,’ said Paul, ‘would never have given herself to such a vulgar man. To a man who gives gifts of real estate!’

  Yet she’d given herself to the young Henneker, who could not have been a gentil and parfait knight.

  We began to walk. Alec was now a black spot in the dazzle of moonlight on ice. ‘She lived by her concepts. She wanted no one else to be enslaved by them. Not even me. She would be hurt to know what Victor thought of her. But men like him – they never come to an honest view of women.’

  ‘You always trusted Sir Eugene,’ I said. He had in fact edited the journal in a rudimentary way to save Sir Eugene pain. ‘Do you think you could speak to him?’

  ‘I’d rather wait till we got back from our journey.’

  I sliced the air with my arm. His ease about the killing, his ease about my knowing, made me desperate. ‘Paul. If you don’t tell him I’ll have to.’

  What was pitiable was that Paul didn’t even think of threatening me. Patricide was his only strength as a criminal.

  ‘But the egg journey …’ he said. ‘It’s my project …’

  When I began to groan he laughed uneasily, in disquiet at causing me grief.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Into the Leader’s alcove!’

  I couldn’t speak now. I thought of his options, believing it likely that they would try to talk him into suicide, offering him a weapon butt first, asking him to be an honourable chap and end their anguish, their quandary. Otherwise there was always exile in the Forbes-Chalmers’s manner, or an ultimate British hanging.

  Unless he was forgiven. Simply forgiven by Sir Eugene. Like that. This unbalanced hope operated on everything I did in the next two days.

  I remembered as we walked how he had found the tracks that evening, how his insistence had brought us to Victor. About this I questioned him.

  ‘I wanted to make sure, of course, that it had been done. Things done in a rage are like dreams. You can’t believe them once you’re awake.’ He stopped a second, remembering apologies owing. ‘And might I say, while we’re talking about passions, how much I regretted having to let that account of your friendship with Lady Hurley stand in Victor’s evil little book. I considered taking it out. But I felt that if I spared you, I would have to spare everyone. Because I like them all. The only exception was one made for the Leader’s sake. And we all depend on the Leader.’

  I asked him about Victor’s letter from Thea Gabriel beginning Dear Victor, Our son … Had he destroyed that? ‘Oh,’ he said, with a light gesture of the hand, ‘I let the wind take it.’

  I wondered whether the absence of the document would ultimately help him in a court of justice, if he lasted long enough to face one.

  ‘We might as well jog now,’ he said then. ‘We can’t have Alec out on his own. It’s contrary to a very wise rule.’

  Paul’s confession to Sir Eugene was very simple. I was still pulling at the curtain to close us off from the rest of the hut when Paul spoke.

  ‘I wanted to tell you that I killed Victor Henneker. It was done in a just rage. I’m very sorry for the anxiety it gave you all. But there’s no answer to a just rage.’

  Sir Eugene nodded, as if Paul were merely confessing the loss of a zoological specimen.

  ‘Why did it happen, Paul?’ he asked. As you would expect, he sounded conversational.

  ‘My reasons were akin to Hamlet’s,’ said Paul, very nearly with a smile. He kept insisting on the literary precedents for his act, as if they would save him. ‘You may be in a better position to understand if I tell you I am Henneker’s natural son.’

  Stewart’s face was no longer inclined in its normal Socratic way. He had raised it full height and now it stared at the ceiling, as if the staggering statement could only be understood against a blank surface.

  ‘Is this true?’ he asked.

  ‘I would not boast about such a painful genealogy,’ Paul said. His lips quivered. ‘I can say only that the victim worked harder than I did at accomplishing his end.’

  It was a statement so apt that Stewart mumbled, ‘Of course, of course.’

  ‘I want only to go to Cape Crozier. I want to have made that contribution to the corpus. To the corpus of Zoology.’

  Stewart asked me, ‘What do you say to that, Tony?’

  ‘I don’t fear him,’ I sa
id. ‘I want him to have that right. To make the journey.’

  Yet my speech seemed rarefied, unreal.

  Stewart said, ‘Very well. But you are not to speak to anyone of this. Neither of you.’

  He rose himself to open the curtain for us. ‘I appreciate these admissions, Paul,’ he murmured. But he rammed a piece of paper into my left hand as well. When he had written it I didn’t know.

  As we went out into the body of the hut he called to us, companionably, for anyone to hear who wanted to. He had asked Dr Dryden if we would like a support party to travel with us the first day or so and lay our depôt behind Erebus. He would take Quincy along as his fellow sledder.

  It was such ordinary polar talk, so off-handedly said, that I thought everything will be ordinary now. He has decided to forget Paul’s aberration and knows that killing your father is something you can do only once.

  We nodded. Sir Eugene withdrew again. Paul thanked me and went through into the naturalist’s hut. Sitting at the table, I opened my fist slowly. It had been clenched around the note so firmly that now the individual fingers shook.

  Stewart’s message asked me to meet him in the meat store in fifteen minutes.

  I couldn’t refuse him, yet thought of pretending to be sick as an alternative to a conference amongst the frozen sides of meat.

  Our meat store was of the same polar design as Forbes-Chalmers’s house. But its entry tunnel was much higher to allow passage to a stooped man with a side of New Zealand lamb on his back. Since Sir Eugene was there before me and had brought a storm lantern, I could see the floor plan of the place at a glance. At one end sides of lamb and quarters of pork, fine New Zealand produce, lay piled. Along the wall opposite the door stood a steel rack from which hung quarters of beef. Behind the door the carcases of Weddell seals were heaped. They resembled discarded luggage, dusty carpet bags say. Along the free wall, Victor’s sailcloth-shrouded corpse could easily be seen in a specially-hacked alcove. It had been considered irreverent to heap a human body indiscriminately with the meat supplies.

  In the middle of the floor space, on a butter crate, sat Sir Eugene, heavily clothed and wearing a navy greatcoat over everything else.

  ‘You can share the crate, Tony,’ Sir Eugene told me, moving up for me.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Do you really think it’s reasonable?’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Sir Eugene.’

  ‘To allow him to walk about. To Cape Crozier and back. God knows where else?’

  ‘He isn’t a danger,’ I said.

  Sir Eugene gestured, with an open-palmed mitt, towards the alcove. ‘Why of course he is. Tell me, did he simply offer the information?’

  ‘I asked him. A friend asking a friend.’

  ‘You simply …?’

  ‘And he said yes.’

  He grew accusatory. ‘It can’t have been a sudden enlightenment,’ he said. He suspected I had withheld stages of reasoning from Alec and himself.

  I began my explanations. A classic crime imposes pontifically its own version of truth upon the votaries, the servants of its flame. Our picture of Victor’s murder, our accepted version, had involved awkward time-tables which we had no more questioned than would a Christian question the established time-table of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

  Our time-table had Victor leaving the hut at two o’clock, travelling through the naturalist’s room going and coming. In this version, only Paul saw him on his return. In this version also, Victor noted the readings in the log on the desk in the weather-room. John Troy had been absent at the time but had come back half an hour later and found the readings entered in the log. No one saw Victor until Quincy spoke to him in the latrines.

  A mannerism of the Rev. Quincy’s had made me understand, I told Sir Eugene, that our picture of the afternoon was based on Paul’s word and, on top of that, the gratuitous performance of PO Henson as a mimic.

  We had promised ourselves – Sir Eugene, Alec, myself – that first night we met, that we would mistrust everyone and question everything. But we were not equipped for that. We did not question Paul or Quincy, or look at the log entries which Paul must have made in a panic hurry after the death.

  While he listened to me, Sir Eugene rubbed with his finger a little hole in the hoar-frost on the crate. ‘You know everything then? All the details?’

  ‘I didn’t ask him for that this morning.’ I admitted, implying I would tomorrow morning or some date soon. ‘It wasn’t simply a matter of that afternoon. I think it began when his mother … the great Thea … decided he ought to become an English gentleman and sent him to Eton. She told him she despised everything such schools stood for, yet still bound him to their ethos by sending him there. I suppose she saw it was his chance of survival – he couldn’t very well grow up to be an erotic dancer. I don’t think she realized, despite all her public criticism of public institutions, just how cruel and conforming boys at places like Eton can be. They scoffed at him because of his mother’s reputation, because he was a publicly proclaimed bastard. And when he asked her who his father was, she’d never say. Yet she always told him that he was a child of love. When boys taunted him he could comfort himself with that. He wasn’t a child of a conventional marriage, he wasn’t a child of bored hostility and habit. He was a child of love. He once stressed the same idea to me, I remember.’

  ‘My God!’ said Sir Eugene. His happy childhood had deprived him of a deal of knowledge. ‘How startling,’ he said.

  I was in fact becoming more embarrassed, my speech was growing more stilted as I tried to explain these matters to Sir Eugene, who greeted them as if they were anthropological data about some lost race.

  I began to diarize for him a more credible time-scheme. When Paul joined the expedition, Henneker already knew he was Thea Gabriel’s son. In the years before Victor decided to … (I didn’t know what phrase to use … to renounce women, I finally decided on) to renounce women, he had known Thea and had a letter from her … one of those letters from notorieties Victor carried everywhere … telling him she considered Paul to be his child. Then Victor saw Paul perform during the early days of the expedition, and grew a little sentimental about his paternity and somewhat proud of the boy.

  I projected that Victor had shown the boy the letter on Mid-Winter’s Evening, when sentiment and blood alcohol had been high in the hut. I didn’t know what the letter actually said, Sir Eugene could find out from Paul and I myself never wanted to know. But, on the basis of Thea Gabriel’s theories, I guessed it very likely said: he is our son … I simply wanted you to know so that we can both secretly rejoice.

  ‘You know something of Thea Gabriel’s theories?’ Sir Eugene asked me at the end of this exposition.

  ‘I was an admirer,’ I told him. And blushed. ‘Of course I don’t know how much you could … you could trust the judgment of Miss Gabriel in this matter. By her own admission, she’s always been promiscuous …’

  I paused, now definitely ashamed of my formal presentation and my reflections on the breath-taking Thea’s morals. I was at a loss to talk any other way to Sir Eugene.

  ‘Paul was devastated of course to have this strange man claiming to be his father. I don’t know if he knew anything of Victor’s strange leanings or whether he could simply tell that Victor was clearly not the sort of man who begets children of love. The following morning when we – Paul and I – went to the weather screen, I thought he was depressed about not being included in the Pole’s party. In fact, the root of the depression was that he all at once had a father. The wrong kind. A despicable one.’

  I was aware now of the third presence, Victor’s meat in its alcove. The meat of a man who had been reckless with his documentation.

  The killing went in this way, I told Sir Eugene. On the way out to the weather screen that afternoon – he could verify the details by talking to Paul – Victor came through the naturalists’ hut. Some conversation began. I believed it probably ended with Victor saying, you?
A child of love? Your mother was a … harlot. Or words to that effect. Paul struck him with whatever was to hand. I thought it was very likely a frozen skua gull he was thawing. Victor probably turned from the blow and it took him on the base of the skull and, since he didn’t have his hood up, he was struck full force. Next Paul strangled him. Thea’s child of love had grown up short-sighted but thick in the limb. ‘Yon boy wi’ glesses’, PO Wallace had muttered early in the expedition, ‘is a fearsome sledder, man.’ On the afternoon, having so quickly cracked Victor’s head and throttled him, Paul continued to move quickly and in great fear. And he too was thinking in terms of classic Edwardian murders, in which footprints were always significant. So, while lumping Victor away, he very likely wore Victor’s finnesköe while carrying his own jammed inside his wind-proofs. Frightened but very rational, he envisaged some professional investigation and put Victor’s boots back on the corpse only when he had dumped it beyond the weather screen. Although he would have had to put his own finnesköe on immediately to avoid being crippled by the cold, he probably walked on his knees or rolled barrel-wise for a distance. This action had been laboured and unnecessary, but in his care, he showed that he too had been a victim to the concepts and conventions of his great crime.

  He believed now that he had created an adequate mystery. Why did Victor wander beyond the weather screen as if undertaking a journey with a blizzard threatening? And how had he died? A divine accident? Involving no other pair of boots.

  Later when he heard that Quincy had spoken to Victor in the latrines long after the event, his confusion must have been an agony. But then he came to believe either that God or the gods were protecting him, or that Quincy was saving him as one would save that other justifiable homicide, Prince Hamlet.

  In the meantime, by half past two, he had been through Victor’s belongings and taken Thea Gabriel’s letter and the journal. He found that his own entry was safe and referred only to his myopia. He destroyed the letter and a certain section of the journal and, in the end, put it on the shelf. Did he want to fog our perceptions further? Did he want to show more fully the moral deficiencies of the man he had killed?